What are they up to now?

Karmenu Vella, Member of the European Commission and in charge of Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries, receives 2017 Volvo Environment Prize winner Professor Rashid Sumaila, Director of the Fisheries Economics Research Unit at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries of the University of British Columbia.

Rashid Sumaila shares expertise with EU stakeholders

In February, Professor Rashid Sumaila – winner of the Volvo Environment Prize 2017 – visited important stakeholders from EU institutions and from wider society in Brussels, Belgium. Rashid Sumaila met with Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs, and Fisheries, to discuss various aspects of Professor Sumaila’s work, such as the use of maritime protected areas as management tools, meeting the threats of oil spills, ocean acidification, and climate change. Professor Rashid Sumaila was also invited to present his work to several highly engaged MEPs, discussing sustainability and ocean protection.

Tipping point warning from Carlos Nobre

Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre received the Volvo Environment Prize in 2016 for his contributions to the understanding and protection of the Amazon, one of the world’s most important ecosystems. He has now published an article with dire warnings on Amazon tipping points in the journal Science Advances. Further deforestation must be curbed, he writes. Otherwise negative synergies between climate change, deforestation and widespread use of fire could flip parts of the Amazon to non-forest ecosystems.

The 2014 winner of the Volvo Environment Prize, Eric Lambin, is a remote sensing pioneer using satellite images and advanced data collection to analyse land use and the influence of humans on the planet. He has now published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on sustainable product labeling. According to him and his co-authors, buying ethically sourced products is not as straightforward as it might seem. While more than half of the global companies surveyed apply sustainability practices somewhere in their supply chain, most of these practices cover only a subset of input materials for a given product. “Our results show a glass half full and half empty”, said Eric Lambin in a comment.